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The Day the Sea Came

For the earth, it was just a twinge. Last Dec. 26, at 7:59 a.m., one part of the planet's undersea crust made an abrupt shift beneath another along a 750-mile seam near the island of Sumatra. The tectonic plates had been grating against each other for millenniums, and now the higher of the two was lifted perhaps 60 feet. For a planet where landmasses are in constant motion across geological time, the event was of no great moment. But for people -- who mark the calendar in days and months rather than eons -- a monumental catastrophe had begun, not only the largest earthquake in 40 years but also the displacement of billions of tons of water, unleashing a series of mammoth waves: a tsunami. These surging mounds of water raced toward land with the speed of a jet aircraft and then slowed as they reared up to leap ashore at heights of 50 feet and higher. They were long as well as tall, stampeding inland and carrying with them all they were destroying. People caught in the waves became small ingredients in an enormous blender, bludgeoned by concrete slabs and felled trees, stabbed by jagged sheets of glass, tangled up in manacles of wire.

The number of the dead and missing is now estimated at 232,000. And while this includes victims from a dozen nations, more than two-thirds -- some 169,000 -- came from a single place, the Indonesian province of Aceh. And of Aceh's mortal toll, more than half -- some 90,000 -- came from a single city, Banda Aceh, and its immediate surroundings. This provincial capital was a place of large government buildings, two major universities, a historic mosque, stores and restaurants, a harbor and a fishing fleet. It sits in the northwest nub of Sumatra, where converging sea lanes from the Malay Peninsula, India and Arabia once sustained a flourishing trade in aromatic spices. The location, for centuries so favorable, was a mere 155 miles from the earthquake's epicenter. Banda Aceh was swamped by the tsunami within 30 minutes of the tremor.

The devastation left its own peculiar boundaries. Roughly a third of the city -- the two miles nearest the Indian Ocean -- was flattened and denuded, with only an occasional tree or shank of cement escaping the sledgehammer strength of the waves. A mile or so farther inland, the destruction was more erratic, its effects less a consequence of battering than of flooding. The rest of the city entirely evaded the water's horrific reach; hours went by before some of its residents even knew the day was anything other than sunny and serene.

But the disposition of who lived and who died was more than a matter of distance from the sea. Indeed, some people lived for the very reasons others died. They were in one part of the city when they ordinarily would have been in another. Some were fortuitously late, others disastrously early. Survival was decided by which road taken, which stairs climbed, which hand held. Once in the grip of the waves, hurled and churned through the malign darkness, some made it through the gantlet of deadly debris. And some did not.

Jaloe, a fisherman, survived because he turned his boat toward the gargantuan waves while others steered away. Dr. Sri, assigned to the general hospital's emergency room, was saved by holiday scheduling. Maisara, a housewife, swam through the turbid water and grabbed hold of a floating wooden beam. Romi, a deliveryman, was carried a mile by the waves and then beached onto a logjam of rubble. Haikal, a social activist, boosted himself atop a buoyant patch of roof. Faridah, a shopkeeper, regained consciousness in time to wrap herself around a palm tree.

Centuries ago, as the Acehnese were sending black pepper and camphor to the West, foreign traders introduced them to Islam. Banda Aceh is a Muslim city, and these six survivors credit their endurance to the supreme will of Allah. He alone holds mastery over life and death, they say. And yet inevitably, survivors cannot help wondering how God's hand might have directed events differently. They revisit their memories of that morning, how violently the ground shook, how mercilessly the sea invaded, how densely tragedy contaminated the city. The suddenness still astonishes them.

After all, it had begun as such an ordinary Sunday.

I. A GHOST IN THE WATER

These past few years, Jaloe, the fisherman, rarely fished at all. He carried no nets inside his 25-foot yellow boat. Instead, he followed the larger vessels out to sea, and when their holding tanks were full of grouper, mackerel and tuna, he would transport some of the load back to market. On an average day, his earnings amounted to less than $3, which was just as good -- or rather as bad -- as what he would have made as part of the fishing crew. But the work did possess the merit of independence. His boat was actually owned by a policeman who shared in the meager profits. But it was Jaloe who controlled the powerful Suzuki outboard motor -- and it was Jaloe who decided when to go out and when to come back.

His real name was Muhammad, simply that. The nickname Jaloe separated him from the many other Muhammads in Aceh. The name means "sampan," or boat without an engine. This fit him well because he was uncomplicated by big ideas and ambitions. He was a sturdy if disheveled man who could never quite tame his bristled black hair. His face was densely lined with furrows like a rumpled bedsheet. Unlike many local fishermen, he managed to stay away from homemade wine, marijuana and the other enticements of the busy harbor. He believed in the heaven and hell described in the Holy Koran, and he was not one to take unnecessary risks with his well-being in eternity.

That morning, as usual, Jaloe, who was 46, was out the door soon after sunup. His wife, Yusnidar, and their three children, Mukhlis, 15, Mutia, 14, and Azarul, 5, were left at home. Their rented wooden shack -- just a 12-by-12-foot space diced into three tiny rooms -- was but 50 yards from the Aceh River, near where it meets the sea. Jaloe carried breakfast with him -- coffee as well as a bar of sticky rice sweetened with coconut milk and packed in banana leaf. In an hour, he was four miles off the coast, within sight of the tree-covered Breueh Islands. The water was remarkably tranquil. Barely a bird arced across the deep blue sky.

Then, around 8, the strangeness began. The sea started to shake up and down as if in a rapid boil. Jaloe was so frightened that he took off his shirt and red jacket and prepared to plunge overboard. He thought a ghost had taken possession of either his wooden boat or the ocean itself. Finally, after about 10 minutes, the mysterious tremor stopped. Jaloe steered alongside the Mitra Buana, one of the many bigger boats fishing in the water. Some of its 15-man crew were already thanking Allah for sparing their lives, their arms outstretched in prayerful submission. The boat's captain, Rhaban bin Ahmad, was Jaloe's friend.

"I think there is a ghost in the sea," Jaloe shouted up at him.

"No ghost," the captain replied. "It was an earthquake."

Jaloe weighed the two possibilities. "I think it was a ghost."

Rhaban had a ship-to-shore radio, but he had failed to reach anyone in Banda Aceh. Now he decided it was best to head back to land. This seemed prudent to Jaloe as well.

But soon after they started out, something even more bizarre had them transfixed. Near the Breueh Islands, the sea began to rush from the land as if sucked through a giant straw. An extra half-mile of ocean floor lay exposed. Giddy people unwittingly charged into the emptied space, grasping at the flopping fish suddenly deserted by the sea.

As the water retreated, it fed the immensity of an approaching wall of water. The wave was two or three times as high as anything Jaloe had ever seen. He anxiously tied himself to the right side of his boat near the engine, then sped directly toward it, just as his grandfather had taught him when he was a small boy. The great wave hoisted his boat at a 45-degree angle, and Jaloe's shoulders were pinned back into the stern. He stayed aloft like that for what seemed a minute before the wave dropped the boat with a stunning slap. Three more tremendous waves followed. And when they had passed, he looked across the open sea for the many boats of the fishing fleet. The Mitra Buana and about half the others were still afloat. The rest had vanished.

Jaloe spent no time searching the sea for survivors. Foremost on his mind were his wife and three children. What would happen to them when waves as mighty as those crashed ashore near his tiny wooden home?

On Christmas, the day before the tsunami, Dr. Sri Murdiati enjoyed an afternoon at the beach with her two best friends, Dr. Cut Mulbay Rus and Dr. Denafianti (who, like many Indonesians, uses only one name). The three unmarried women, all in their mid- to late 20's, were recent medical-school graduates. They shopped together, ate in restaurants, took short trips. Dr. Sri often relied on them for transportation. Many women in Banda Aceh drove motorbikes, commonly riding around in fashionable tunics, blue jeans and the Muslim head scarf, known locally as the jilbab. But Dr. Sri was easily flustered, and steering through traffic made her nervous. She didn't like too many things coming at her at once.

Accompanying them at the beach was Dr. Pria Agustus Yadi, the city's only gastrointestinal surgeon. He had been their teacher in med school and continued to be a mentor. During one playful moment, they all waded into the sea. For the women, this meant entering fully clothed. Such modesty was not only a matter of custom but also the law. Many Acehnese considered themselves more pious than their countrymen in Sulawesi, Java and elsewhere. Two years earlier, the provincial Legislature enacted Shariah, the law codifying personal devotion to Islam. In Banda Aceh, the measure had proved of minor consequence. Surely it hadn't stopped the gluttonous corruption of government officials. Public jobs -- even those within the police -- were still for sale. But the religious law did affect female head wear. Most women had worn the jilbab before. Now they all did.

After watching the sunset, the foursome of doctors split up. The women were scheduled to work at separate locations. Usually on a Saturday night, Dr. Sri would have gone to Meuraxa Hospital, which is near the sea and where Dr. Cut would soon die, her body swallowed by the annihilating waves and never found. Instead the holiday schedule placed Dr. Sri farther inland at Dr. Zainoel Abidin General Hospital, the city's largest.

It was a relatively easy night for her: abrasions from a traffic accident, an asthma attack, a little boy with diarrhea, another boy with a weeping eye caused by conjunctivitis. Dr. Sri was even able to steal some sleep in a small anteroom. At 8 a.m., her 12-hour shift would be done, and she was eager to get home. As she will always recall, had her replacement arrived on time, the horrific burden ahead would have been his, not hers.

The earthquake started slowly, then intensified within a minute. Things began to move side to side like a clapper in a bell. Oxygen tanks fell over. Bottles tumbled from shelves. Beds lurched one way, then spun in another. The E.R.'s air-conditioner was jolted right out of the wall. People rushed outside and sat on the ground, unable to stand while the earth was in such violent spasms. The hospital building was holding up well, but a few others nearby were collapsing. The massive dome of the Al-Makmur Mosque plunged right through the ceiling, making a thunderous, terrifying noise like a bomb.

accumulating collection of the dazed and pitiful and bloody. One was a man with a severed ring finger. Another was a small boy with a crushed skull; he was conscious and sobbing. A middle-aged woman was carried in by her husband and brother-in-law. A blow to her back had left her legs paralyzed; blood was seeping from a deep gash in her right thigh.

The hospital's administrators had never prepared for such an onrush. Little in the way of supplies was kept in the emergency room -- no IV's, no painkillers, few bandages. The hospital had little money to spare; as in many poor nations, after new patients were examined, their families were then dispatched to buy drugs, syringes and other items needed for treatment.

In fact, there was a small pharmacy conveniently located across the street. Dr. Sri had just seen the poorly constructed building crumble as the earth shuddered.

Within an hour, most everything that Maisara, the housewife, loved would be swept away by the sea. But in the moments before the earthquake, her concern was whether she was an overindulgent mother. She had three bright, personable girls, ages 11, 9 and 3. The youngest was asleep, but the older ones were once again under the spell of the Sunday-morning cartoons, including their favorite, a show about the Japanese character Doraemon. At such a time, they expected to be served breakfast in front of the TV. Firda, the eldest, had ordered fried rice with a scrambled egg. Ulfa, her sister, insisted on noodle soup.

Maisara, who was 33, had built her life around her family. "My house is my heaven," she would say. She was married to Muharram M. Nur, a newspaper reporter with a reputation for integrity, a man who refused to barter favorable press coverage for cash, a practice known in Indonesia as "taking the envelope." Muharram's mother had taught religion classes, and she had chosen Maisara, her best student, as a wife for her dutiful eldest son. Maisara, eight years younger than Muharram, was only 17 when she became engaged. She had wanted to go to college but failed the entrance exam. Muharram would venture into the world; Maisara would stay at home.

For years, the couple scrimped. Muharram worked extra jobs, turning over the earnings to his wife. Most Acehnese women convert their cash into gold, and Maisara secreted hers in a Tupperware container in a bedroom cupboard. By 1996, they had saved enough for a $650 down payment on a two-story home, buying a lot just east of the city in Lambada, where block after block of new houses were supplanting the paddy fields.

The quake, terrible as it was, caused no damage to their sturdy brick-and-cement house. But just down the road was a new prison, its construction nearly complete. Muharram was in bed with a cold when the tremor began, and now a boy on a bicycle hurried by to inform him that the prison walls had tumbled. The reporter figured this could be his part in the day's earthquake coverage. He picked up a notebook, a cellphone and his new digital camera. "Dad is going out for a while," he told his girls before driving off in his Suzuki minivan. The family would never see him again.

Ulfa, the 9-year-old, was curious about earthquake damage around the neighborhood. She walked to the next block to reconnoiter, gone for 5 minutes, 10 at the most. When she returned, she was overcome with terror. "Mama, Mama, the water!" she was shouting. Ulfa pulled her older sister by the hand. "Let's run!" she pleaded.

Maisara assumed there would soon be a flood, just like the one the previous year. Her first thought was to retrieve the family's money and gold for safekeeping. She went back toward the house, telling Anis, her 3-year-old, to wait for her outside and promising to return with a glass of milk. But Ulfa, seeing her mother tarry, yelled back at her in panic, "Mama, forget everything and run!"

There was such fear in the girl's face that Maisara scooped Anis into her arms and rushed through the front gate. She followed her daughters a short way up the street, then across the public volleyball court and onto the main thoroughfare.

The road was already filled with people. Cars were lurching as drivers competed for any smidgen of space to accelerate. Firda and Ulfa were much faster than their mother and were soon out of sight. For Maisara, quickly out of breath, it was a struggle merely to keep her feet in motion. She was overweight. Her flip-flops slapped clumsily on the asphalt. Anis, clutching her neck, was heavy to carry.

Maisara did not look back. She could hear an odd, ever-louder roar. But she never actually saw what she was running from. Only Anis, looking over her mother's left shoulder, beheld the oncoming water. "Mama, what is that?" the little girl kept yelling.

Romi, the deliveryman, lived in Lamjabat, within a mile of the sea. As in most communities in Banda Aceh, the rich lived alongside the poor. The former owned large two-story homes with ornate columns, curved balconies and layered A-frame roofs. Romi, on the other hand, lived in a traditional panggung house made of wood and held six feet off the ground by stilts. The structure measured only 24 feet by 30 feet, but in temperate Sumatra, which embraces the Equator, most people spent the greater part of their time outdoors. Romi, who was 33, certainly did. A stocky man with a smooth, friendly face, he was relentlessly sociable, his good humor a lubricant in most any conversation.

For nearly 12 years, Romi worked as a security guard in the city's only museum. It was an undemanding job that paid $50 a week. He was fired the previous summer after helping himself to some unused lumber. The dismissal, rather than becoming a financial setback, seemed only to inspire Romi's entrepreneurial instincts. He made a deal with a bakery and each day delivered 750 rolls filled with chocolate, marmalade or sweet bean paste, carrying them in a plywood box strapped to the back of his motorcycle. His wife relinquished 21 grams of gold -- most of her dowry -- to help Romi buy a used becak, a motorbike with a sidecar that is used as a taxi. He drove it in the evenings. What's more, he tried to use his affability to sell life insurance. The products were described in booklets that he kept at his bedside, though so far he had sold only a single policy -- and that to himself. If he could keep up the annual payments, his death would yield $12,500.

When the earthquake jolted him from sleep, Romi was lying beside his only child, 2-year-old Bella. He lifted her from the mattress seconds before a cabinet fell on the bed. Once outside, Romi joined his wife, Sri Wahyuni, and the three of them held onto one another until the ground ceased convulsing. Afterward, people milled about, their conversations alternating between expressions of worry and relief as they took stock of their loved ones and property.

Uncharacteristically, Romi stayed away from all this talk. His intention was to eat a quick breakfast and then start the rounds of his bread route. He walked to a nearby store to buy some rice in coconut milk. Then, as he returned home, he heard the first of the panic-stricken shouting. "Air laut naik!" "The sea is coming!" People were sprinting up Pendidikan road. Some jumped into any available car or truck. One driver was speeding away in reverse.

Romi's indifference to this frenzy would later bewilder him. He blithely walked to his back stairs, holding Bella with his right hand and the breakfast with his left. He, too, presumed people were fretting about a flood. The thought of it actually gave him a mild sense of satisfaction. Sometimes the world gives a poor man a break, he thought. His panggung house stood six feet off the ground. Flood waters would pass underneath.

The social activist, Teuku Achmad Fuad Haikal, was the director of the Aceh NGO Forum, an association of groups advocating good governance. This was no easy agenda in a place of habitual corruption. Further disrupting the social order was the bloody, wearying violence commonly referred to as "the conflict." Separatist guerrillas from the Free Aceh Movement (known as GAM) had been fighting to secede from Indonesia since 1976. For years, the military responded with a massive deployment and all the nastier methods of counterinsurgency. Tactics were devious as well as brutal, with one side often impersonating the other as they carried out kidnappings and extortion.

Haikal, who was 34, kept up an appearance of neutrality, which was unnatural for such an opinionated man. Slender and spry, he was a whirlwind of movement and high-speed conversation. Though he usually dressed simply in a white T-shirt and blue jeans, his presence was reliably conspicuous. He made a grand show of even casual greetings in the street, his face displaying a full repertory of exaggerated expressions. His laugh, a literal "ha-ha," leapt boisterously from his throat. Two cellphones competed for his attention.

That morning, Haikal intended to sleep late, having been up until 3 a.m. preparing to lead an out-of-town seminar. Roused by the earthquake, he hurried for the front door in his undershorts. He found his 3-year-old daughter, Aisyah, sitting at the entrance, crying. His wife, Mawarni, was already outside with their other girl, 13-year-old Ika. The four of them hastened to safety in the middle of an open field.

Their rented one-story house was in an area called Peulanggahan, about one and a half miles from the sea. Twenty minutes after the quake, a close friend of Haikal's -- 20-year-old Heri Supriadi -- rushed over on his Honda motorbike. That morning, he had been among hundreds of participants in a 10-kilometer run that started in Banda Aceh's main park, Blang Padang. The ground began to tremble just a minute into the start of the race. Unable to stay on his feet, Heri sat down right in front of the city's best hotel, the Kuala Tripa. He watched goggle-eyed as the bottom crumpled under the weight of the top. The curved building now looked as if a giant had tried to stuff it into a suitcase.

As Heri amazed the family with details, a commotion interrupted his tale. People were running up the street, shouting, "Air laut naik!"

Haikal looked to the west and saw the crest of the wave over distant houses, consuming the treetops. Holding his 3-year-old, he began to run, commanding his wife and other daughter to do the same. Suddenly they were part of a crowd in a wild dash toward the narrow Peunayong bridge, which spanned the Aceh River. Heri Supriadi's motorcycle offered a swifter getaway. When Heri got it turned around, Haikal helped his wife and daughters squeeze onto the back. Then the bike sped out of sight, leaving Haikal to his own desperate escape. He could hear the rumble of the imminent wave but did not want to slow down to look back. The street was badly paved and pebbles cut into his bare feet, but he kept his arms and legs churning. He followed the road to the right, then the left. He passed a small mosque and turned right again until he was in front of a fence of iron bars that surrounded a family cemetery.

To his confusion, he then saw people running toward him from the opposite direction, shrieking, "Air sungai naik!" "The river is coming!" Swollen by the great wave, the Aceh River had jumped its banks. The water was now both ahead of Haikal and behind him. Usually so decisive, he had no idea which way to go. So he simply took a few steps back against the cemetery fence and made two fists around the bars.

Faridah, the shopkeeper, sold rice, sugar, cigarettes and toiletries from a small kiosk covered with a roof of tin and straw. Strong coffee was also served. For those inclined to dawdle, there was the comfort of a table, 10 wooden chairs and two benches.

As a teenager, Faridah had boldly declared her own modest but practical standard for matrimony: a husband would have to bring her fewer troubles instead of more. She remained single until her mid-30's, a smart, genial and attractive woman regularly turning away suitors, including three in one year. Finally she married Darwis bin Saidan, a younger man who had worked his way up from construction jobs into a career as a building contractor. He would help his self-reliant wife expand her store.

Faridah, who was 44, and her extended family lived in Bitai, an area one and a half miles inland. After she suffered three miscarriages, she and Darwis became parents by formally adopting the daughters of Faridah's sickly younger sister. Those girls -- Sarah, 3, and Siti, 2 -- were with their natural mother on the morning of the quake. Faridah hurried to them after the earth calmed and found them unhurt if terrified. Mangroves on both sides of a nearby stream had been wrenched clear out of the ground, falling atop one another at odd angles.

After a few minutes, Faridah decided to return to her husband, who had gone back into their house to put on his pants. As she walked home, she heard a noise that sounded like an accelerating airplane engine. She scoured the sky, and when she saw nothing, she looked at the distant mountains, her hand shielding her eyes like a visor. Something massive was coming toward the city. It appeared bluish-black, like the color of the peaks through a haze. Had the mountains sprung loose and begun a charge across flat soil?

Faridah had never seen such a thing. Her mind, craving explanation, sorted through the possibilities until eventually the answer became obvious.

This was the end of the world.

II. THE SEA IS COMING

A cubic yard of water -- barely enough to surround two people seated with their legs crossed -- weighs nearly a ton. The tsunami had dispatched billions of tons led by a cliff of water that crashed ashore at the height of the palm trees. For two miles into the city, only the cement foundations of buildings were left as evidence of what had once existed, and often there was not even that. The waves, as if angry, not only stomped, they also eviscerated, burrowing into the ground and paring off long stretches of road. The water took prisoner everything it conquered: slabs of concrete and patches of tin roofs; beams and trees; nails and windowpanes; refrigerators and stoves; sofas and tables; clothing and books; boats, trucks, cars and motorbikes; livestock and pets; survivors and corpses.

Faridah, the shopkeeper, only knew she was about to be struck terribly hard and probably killed. Her muscles taut, she stood against a fence fashioned from kuda-kuda trees and barbed wire. Her right arm was hooked around a fence post; her left hand was clasped around her husband's arm at the elbow. The noise, steadily building, had turned into the throbbing of a thousand drums. She could feel it with her feet. A pelting of spray preceded the wave by a few seconds. Then Faridah was engulfed and propelled.

The water was warm. It seemed muddy and sulfurous. It spun her and jerked her. She couldn't see. As she struggled for breath, she gulped some, and it tasted salty and foul. Her arms were useless. Objects struck her, and she felt cut, poked and punched. Something smacked her left eye. Then she stopped, her body upside down, pinned against something flat that she took to be a wall. A car -- or what seemed a car -- pushed against her and then slid away. Finally, the wall broke apart, and the water pitched her to the surface. She gulped for air. She saw the car, some floating trees, nothing else.

When she came to, she was shouting, "Allahu akbar!" "God is great!" Her memory is uncertain about this proclamation of faith. Had she really been shouting it even while unconscious? Was it the prayer that saved her? Whatever the sequence, she now realized that for at least a while she had outlasted the waves. But she had no idea where the water had taken her. She looked around, seeing only the tops of palm and mango trees. Was this still Banda Aceh? Was this Indonesia? Was this some new faraway place?

Pieces of debris were drifting by, and Faridah reached for a hunk of wood. She wanted to float on it, but it was too small, and her weight made it sink. She eventually saw that the water was teeming with objects. She made her way to a palm frond, and when she pulled on it, she realized the branch was still attached to a sturdy tree, the tip of which stood at the waterline. Faridah wrapped her arms and legs around this vertical refuge.

In time, a thin mattress floated her way, and she grabbed that as well. Still clinging to the tree trunk with her legs, she was able to lie back and rest on the bedding, allowing the hot sun to dry her bloodied face and the fresh air to fill her grateful lungs.

Haikal, the social activist, stared right into the oncoming wave. It tore him from the cemetery fence and flipped him head over heels. His shorts began to come off, and he grabbed them with his hand. He kept his mouth tightly shut. His eyes were open, but the water was thick and dark. Debris smacked against his flesh, but he was numb to the pain.

The wave carried him only 150 yards, a short distance compared with the wayward ride of so many others. As he surfaced, he saw familiar buildings and knew precisely where he was, within the banks of the overflowed Aceh River, just north of the Peunayong bridge. A large hunk of tin roof was floating beside him. He boosted himself atop it and was able to stand. He looked toward the mountains. He, too, had thought this might be the end of the world. He recalled the prophecy: On Judgment Day, mountains would rise into the air like balls of cotton. But now, looking into the distance, he saw that the peaks were still solidly in place, and he reasoned instead that a natural disaster had done the damage. A tsunami, it was called. He knew the term from the Discovery Channel.

The hunk of roof was a serviceable raft, but debris limited its movement. Some of the rubble was already piled a story high. Fishing boats had been scooped from the river and hurled far inland by the wave, but one 60-foot craft now lay wedged behind a corner store, Peunayong Oil. The accumulated wreckage made something of a bridge up to the vessel, and Haikal climbed aboard, finally resting against the back wall of the pilot's station. He took stock of his injuries, the worst of them gashes on his right shoulder and left foot.

Then he heard someone cry out. "Please, help me!" It was an older man, grossly overweight, a pathetic figure trapped in the river's debris from the waist down. Haikal, though enfeebled by exhaustion, nonetheless tried to be of assistance. But he couldn't dislodge the man. There was a bearded fellow nearby. Haikal called out to him, and together they pried the man loose. The three then staggered back to the boat.

They had rested only a short while when there was another cry for help, this time from a woman buried up to her armpits in a heap of wood and metal. Her arms were above her head as if in a signal of surrender. This time, only Haikal was willing to go. But as he pulled at the rubble, he heard more shouting: "Air laut naik lagi!" "The sea is coming again!" The warning was true. He could see another wave.

He put his mouth close to the woman's ear and said, "Sister, I'll go look for help."

But this was merely an artful exit. He meant to run for his life.

Romi, the deliveryman, barely saw the wave before it obliterated his panggung house. Bella, his 2-year-old daughter, was ripped from his arms in an instant. The water knocked Romi sideways, rolled him over, beat him with debris and carried him for nearly a mile. He broke the surface long enough to observe his own breakneck passage through a hearty stand of bamboo. A second wave pushed him back down, and he accelerated again through the gantlet, grabbing at things, trying to slow himself down.

It was no use. When he came up again, he was still in the torrent, swooshing toward a big white house. He expected to smack into its side, but tons of debris had beaten him to it, and instead he crashed into a massive logjam of detritus. He was marooned on a peninsula of rubble that led to the damaged house, leaving him otherwise surrounded by the chest-deep spillage of the waves. With what seemed the last of his strength, he boosted himself onto a flat area of wood to keep from becoming ensnared in the amassing wreckage. His body had taken a terrible beating. He lay on his back and trembled in pain. His left shoulder felt dislocated, and he could see wounds on his arms through the shreds of his shirt. The skin on his back felt scraped away. His knees were bleeding beneath his torn pants. He tried to stand, but his legs wouldn't hold him.

For several minutes, he shut his eyes and remained soothingly still. When he did manage to gaze around, all he saw was devastation, except for some far-off trees and the remnant walls of a few sundered homes. Also nearby were a refrigerator and a smashed-up car. And close to his feet, jammed within a mound of wood, was a dead woman. Only her head was visible, and Romi felt compelled to stare at it for a long time.

He squinted. He tilted his own head at various angles. Then he finally felt sure. The hair was too long to be his wife's, and he did not recognize the earrings.

Where Maisara lived, the waves were preceded by water sluicing at knee level, cutting her legs out from under her as she ran. The housewife, holding her 3-year-old in her arms, fell backward and was carried toward a nearby paddy field. Then a big wave hit, washing over them and easily pulling mother and daughter apart.

Maisara tumbled and turned, and as the water finally allowed her to surface, she grabbed something that felt like a human limb. In the mental snapshot she made of that fraction of a second, she had hold of her little girl's ankle. As she will forever recollect it, Anis's expression was one of undeniable serenity, the youngster still clad in the blue underwear she used as pajamas, wearing a gold necklace on which her name was engraved.

Another wave came, and Maisara was once again torn away. The water launched her on a zigzag route that ended a mile to the southeast of her home. The jaunt was fast but not smooth. Something very sharp tore into her left leg. She collided with a tin roof and then was pitched over its angled frame. She found herself wedged under an uprooted tamarind tree, swallowing the filthy water as she struggled for air. Yet another wave knocked the heavy tree away, and she felt the branches rake across her exposed skin. That morning she was dressed in a head scarf, a sleeveless T-shirt, shorts and a long cotton dress. Now she was wearing only her bra and her wedding ring.

Maisara was a strong swimmer, and as the water calmed, she made her way to a large floating beam. When she wrapped her arms around it, she felt a coconut beneath. The beam was caught in the crown of a short palm tree. She anchored herself to the trunk and tried to catch her breath. She was depleted of strength and confused. What had happened to her three daughters? Where was her husband? How would she find them?

She barely moved for a few minutes, oblivious to anything around her. Then a weak voice called her name. "Sister Mai, help." Tia, one of her neighbor's daughters, a woman about 25 years old, was struggling to stay afloat a few yards away. Maisara stretched out a hand, but the space between them was too great. For her children, she would have somehow found the strength to try harder. For her husband, she would have risked her life. But for a neighbor, however dear, the distance was too far to go.

Maisara told the woman: "I'm sorry. I don't have the energy. Just pray." And then she watched Tia sink into the darkness and never come up again.

The general hospital was far enough inland to avoid the towering waves. But it did not escape the floods. With the earthquake's first aftershock, everyone again rushed from the emergency room, afraid the roof would fall. Outside, standing with her patients near the front portico, Dr. Sri heard that catch phrase of panic. Air laut naik! The words mystified her at first; at that point, she knew nothing of the tsunami. Then water began pouring in from across the boulevard. The level rose astonishingly fast.

Most of the patients and their families ran for an outside staircase to the second and third floors. But the least ambulatory were left behind. A young woman with a huge wound on her foot clutched Dr. Sri's hand, pleading hysterically: "Please don't leave me. I don't want to die here." The woman had been rolled outside on the wheels of a metal-framed bed. Now she was floating in chest-high water on the plastic-encased foam mattress, kept from drifting away by Dr. Sri's tiring grip. Three more patients were similarly afloat, held by others and bobbing like flotsam from a shipwreck.

Dr. Sri, at 4-foot-9, was shorter than the others. The dirty water lapped at her chin. To stay above it, she stepped atop a two-foot-high cement wall that bordered the walkway to the E.R.'s entrance. That wall proved a salvation. Two men -- relatives of a patient -- had an idea. They used a bed as a ladder, positioning it from the wall to a second, higher cement slab that was just below the A-frame roof of the portico. One by one, everyone made the climb, pulled by those two men at the top and pushed by people at the bottom.

At the apex of the roof was an open window to the dry second floor, where so many others had already fled. Housed on this level were an administrative office, a small library and a locked dental clinic. Dr. Sri, who had only a pair of scissors in her pocket, ordered people to scavenge for supplies. Curtains were torn from a library window to be cut into tourniquets. An intern kicked through the dental clinic's door.

"Look for things we can use to stop bleeding or stitch a wound," Dr. Sri said.

After rifling through a dozen drawers, a security guard brought her several shiny implements of dentistry, none of any use in sewing up wounds. Woefully little of value could be found, just some sutures, wads of cotton, a half bottle of alcohol and refills for the water cooler. There were needles, but they were the tiny kind, good for gums, not skin. They wouldn't penetrate deeply. They'd bend; they'd break. But they'd have to do.

Dr. Sri tended patients on the second floor; Dr. Iskandar, a resident, worked on the third. There was no anesthetic, so they improvised. Ice cubes were applied each time a needle was about to prick through skin. But this didn't do much to deaden the pain, and patients howled while their families held them down. Dr. Sri sewed and sewed. It was hasty, inadequate, unnerving labor. She often closed only the surface of a wound, with wide stitches that didn't stop the bleeding. Yet even as she attended to one patient, there were others at her shoulder. "Me next!" they were demanding. "Take me next!"

As Jaloe, the fisherman, steered his boat back to Banda Aceh, the first sign of the city's destruction was hundreds of coconuts. It seemed as if truckloads had been dumped into the sea, and now they eddied his way. More puzzling yet, he saw a cow gamely struggling to swim. He pointed out the animal to the crew of the Mitra Buana. They looped a rope around its neck, and two men dived in and tied its legs. A cow was worth a fortune, far more than any fish, perhaps even $300. The crew, straining as if in a tug of war, hauled it aboard only to discover that its stomach was grotesquely distended from swallowing sea water. The unfortunate cow died within minutes, and the fishermen exerted themselves yet again to heave the carcass back into the ocean.

By then, Jaloe was racing ahead, anxious to find out about his family. From 300 yards away, as best he could tell, Lampulo, the area where he lived, had simply been erased. This seemed impossible. He wondered if he had somehow gotten turned around or if the sunlight had created an illusion. How could the busy place he left in the morning become a vast plateau of emptiness in just a few hours?

Then the sea began to carry him answers in the form of busted-apart houses and whatever had been within. At 150 yards out, he glimpsed his first dead body. The naked young woman was floating face down. Jaloe grabbed her long hair with his left hand, feeling a squish of mud and water in his fist, and he hooked his right arm under her left shoulder, lifting her aboard. He laid the corpse face down in the middle of the boat, across the side-to-side wood struts that fishermen refer to as the whalebones.

He had barely gone 20 yards more when he saw a second body. Only the left side of this woman's head was above the water. He pulled her into the boat in the same fashion. She, too, was naked, though only from the waist up. This bareness troubled Jaloe. An illiterate man, he had never actually read the teachings of Islam. But as he understood these things, a body's spirit lives on until burial. He did not want the spirits of these women to be embarrassed, so he covered them as best he could with his red jacket.

Almost immediately, he saw someone else. A bedraggled old man was hugging an inner tube and waving so weakly it seemed he lacked strength to push aside even the air. Blood from a wound, deep as a gill slit, trickled from his right ear down to his shoulder. As Jaloe lifted him into the boat, he gently asked the man, "Where do you live?"

But the man didn't answer -- or even look into his rescuer's face. Instead he sat limply on the floor of the boat at Jaloe's feet and closed his eyes. He would keep them shut the whole time, as if by doing so he could make something he had seen go away.

Survivors, clinging to stalwart trees, were chanting prayers. "Asyhadu an laa ilaaha illallahu," "I swear there is no God but Allah." Maisara, astride a palm tree, was comforted to hear the familiar devotions. Then the prayers suddenly gave way to exclamations of terror. "Air laut naik lagi!" Another wave was coming.

This one was not as big as the other three, but it swept Maisara away, and there she was again, jounced about, butting into things. The housewife seemed to pass out, or nearly so, and when she came to, she was clutching a betel tree, crazy with fear. The flooded earth around her appeared so primeval that it left her mystified. Where might this be? All she could think to do was to scream her husband's name: "Muharram! Muharram!"

Eventually, she looked more closely. Dry land was only 50 yards away, and after an hour or so, the water seemed to be draining. Every so often, Maisara warily shimmied down the tree and wiggled her toes beneath the darkness, hoping to touch bottom. At last, she felt some soft mud and dropped down. The water remained shoulder high, and sharp objects were underfoot. Debris blocked her way. She was hopelessly fatigued. An escape to dry land seemed too daunting. Then she saw a man walking. "Help me," she called out.

The man's name was Sambiyo. He was a Mobile Brigade policeman, part of a special unit trained to fight the GAM insurgency. At first, he thought a ghost might be luring him into the slough. For the past hour, he had been picking up the dead, and the ghoulish task had the effect of a nightmare. Bodies suddenly stared up at him from the water; they hung from trees like branches of flesh. Sambiyo was glad to have his AK-101 hanging from the shoulder of his wet brown uniform. "Brother, please help me," this raspy female voice kept calling. Reluctantly, he waded into the dark water, using his hands to shove aside debris and casting his eyes about in search of the supernatural. As he got close to the woman, he could see only her face and her hair, and they were mottled with mud. He ventured closer, and when he was within a few feet, he realized she was naked.

"But you have no clothes on," he protested.

"It's O.K.," Maisara pleaded. "Just help me."

Faridah, the shopkeeper, had her legs tightly wrapped around a tree, but the rest of her was reclining on a mattress that finally began to sink as the flood waters ebbed. In time, she could see a few people on foot. So she, too, climbed down. The water was knee-deep in some spots, waist-high in others. Nothing looked familiar. She started to wander, alternately crawling, walking and swimming. The tsunami had not only sapped her strength but had also taken all her clothes except her panties. The left side of her face was bleeding, and her eye was swollen shut. Her body hurt all over. The worst of it was the area behind her left knee. Something sharp had opened a hole.

Everywhere she went, she was among the dead. One body lacked a head. Another's insides poured out. Faridah thought it wrong to look away. Each of these corpses might be someone from her family. Once, she thought she saw her husband's body angled into the debris, his head on the ground and feet in the air. But she was mistaken.

With each step, she was closer to dry ground. The water was now mostly puddles and muck. When she reached a house that was nearly intact, she met a woman who informed her that she was in Lamteumen. That was nearly a mile southeast of Faridah's home. She continued on, splashing and stumbling through the rubble toward the nearest mosque. Dozens of the dead were lying there in uneven rows, most of them partly concealed under scraps of cloth or plastic. She dutifully peeked beneath.

Faridah followed the main road to areas less damaged. The shame of her near-nakedness was diminished by the sight of so many others either undressed or clad in swatches. People were sobbing or praying or simply surrendering to their stupefaction. What had happened to their world? No one knew. Other people were single-mindedly purposeful, searching among the living and dead for those they loved.

Generosity was not always common. Acts of selfishness not only seemed prudent but also well earned through personal trauma. Hoarding of all sorts had already begun. Still, there were kindnesses. An acquaintance shared a piece of bread and a bottle of water with Faridah. A stranger gave her a sarong. A man on a motorbike took her to Fakinah Hospital. The place was overwhelmed. Bodies lay haphazardly in the parking lot. Little in the way of medical supplies remained. The injured milled about hopelessly. A man on the front terrace was trying to reinsert his own intestines. Under an awning, on a small table, Faridah found swabs of cotton and a bottle of Betadine disinfectant. She sat on a bench and poured some into the palm of her right hand, applying it like a lotion.

The ominous percussion of earthquakes kept people in prolonged terror. That day, geophysicists in Banda Aceh recorded 37 tremors measuring at 4.0 or above, a level detectable to humans. The initial panic was kept alive now as a mass phobia. People imagined the waves again vaulting ashore. Time and again they cried out, "Air laut naik!"

During one of these maddening scares, dozens of people raced up the steps to the hospital's second floor. But the door was locked. All but a few of the distraught then rushed away before someone arrived with a key. Faridah, among the remaining, went inside and pushed against a door that was slightly ajar. It led to an empty room. Standing alone, she could barely believe what she saw. A plastic scoop was floating in a tub of clean water. She was able to remove her sarong and rinse the dense mud away.

As Romi, the deliveryman, lay immobile in pain, he heard voices. Two men were coming his way, but they were interested only in the dead woman at his feet. One man rooted through the thick debris and studied the remains. "My wife! My wife!" he began to wail. Then the other man took a look. "No, no, this isn't your wife," he said, interrupting the lamentation and forcing the first man to reconsider. They finally agreed that the woman was someone else. As they walked away, one had the decency to look back at Romi and apologize for ignoring him. "I'm sorry we can't help you," he said.

With the water now at chest level, Haikal, the activist, began the search for his wife and two daughters. He went first over to the Peunayong bridge, then to drier ground near the Grand Mosque, then back toward his house. He tried to brace himself with faith. If his family was alive, he'd be forever grateful to God, he told himself. If they were dead, he'd take comfort in knowing they were at Allah's side and he'd one day rejoin them in heaven.

At about 1 p.m., he accepted a ride to his parents' house. They lived outside the affected zones in Ulee Kareng. Amazingly enough, in just a few minutes he was back within a familiar world that had been spared ruin. The house was whole; its contents were clean. The electricity worked; the TV was on. Fish and rice were cooking on the stove.

Haikal's parents were desperate for news. He had five brothers and sisters. The extended family numbered in the dozens, and many were missing. Haikal told his own awful story: He had allowed himself to become separated from his wife and daughters. When he last saw them, they were speeding off on the back of a friend's motorbike.

He was impatient to resume his search. Of the city's eight hospitals, only Kesdam -- the one operated by the military -- was really functioning. But when Haikal went there, it, too, was in a tumult, overrun with the injured, blood on the floors, the living lying beside the dead. Haikal checked every room and desolately moved on.

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His timing was poor. Had he stayed longer, he might have met his injured young friend Heri Supriadi. And he might also have seen his older daughter, 13-year-old Ika, as she struggled to breathe, carried through the corridors in the arms of a soldier.

Dr. Sri hurriedly daubed, wiped, sewed, snipped and then repeated the wearying sequence yet again. With so many patients, it was difficult to decide whom to help next, and that is perhaps how she lost track of Rosdiana, the middle-aged woman lying on a bloody mattress on the floor. The patient was partly paralyzed. The gash in her thigh was only an inch wide, but it went deep. Stitches had not stanched the bleeding, and suddenly Rosdiana's breathing had slackened to a faint, intermittent wheeze. The woman's inconsolable husband and brother-in-law tearfully hovered at her side. Dr. Sri tried C.P.R., pressing against the patient's chest as an intern breathed into the woman's mouth. For a brief time, everyone grew hopeful. Then Rosdiana died.

In her final moments of consciousness, the woman told her husband: "I'm sorry. Who'll take care of the children?" That heartbreaking goodbye reminded Sri of her own family. She lived three miles from the sea with her parents, sister and grandmother. Her father had a neurological condition and could no longer walk properly. Her grandmother was infirm. What had happened to them amid the flooding and the waves? Dr. Sri repeatedly tried to phone. But service had been dead since the earthquake.

She worried that she had made the wrong choice. Shouldn't she have gone home? Had her absence caused the death of someone she loved? One by one, her colleagues were abandoning the patients. Even Suriati, a nurse she considered among the most dependable, had gone off into the knee-deep flood, anxious to be with her 20-month-old daughter. (The girl swallowed too much water and died the next day.) Dr. Iskandar, the resident, also went home. He was a newlywed with a pregnant wife. (She miscarried.)

Still, Dr. Sri and a few interns stayed on, though she wondered what they were accomplishing. All the medical supplies had been used. The floors were slippery with mud. Flies were feasting on ribbons of blood. And yet the injured continued to come, calling out their demands. The pressure seemed unbearable. From a window, Dr. Sri shrieked to those arriving below: "Don't come up here! We can't help you!"

Jaloe, the fisherman, maneuvered his boat through the channel and into the Aceh River toward the Peunayong bridge. Debris clogged the passage. The only other boats he saw were the defeated prey of the waves, half sunk or smashed ashore or resting atop buildings as if dropped from the sky. Jaloe steered toward the left of the bridge, the spot where he wanted to leave the two bodies. As he got close, he realized he was crying.

He removed the second woman first. She was face down. He hooked his arms under her shoulders, and as he tugged the body, her head fell back and her eyes met his. He quickly looked away, then returned for the other woman. He put them both by a cement retaining wall, covering them with plastic salvaged from the surrounding debris.

The old man he rescued did not want to budge from the boat. Jaloe yanked him up, and the man staggered to the same wall, where he sat down facing the river. The fisherman stood in front of him for a moment, expecting to hear "Assalamu alaikum," "Peace be with you," or even a simple thank-you. But the man said nothing, and Jaloe never saw him again.

By nature, Romi, the deliveryman, was an optimist. Despite the cataclysm, despite his own crippled condition, he was sure his wife and their Bella -- the little girl he had been holding -- had survived. He believed the family would be reunited just as soon as he was rescued.

Romi was not entirely alone on his peninsula of rubble. About 30 feet away -- obscured by the haphazard mounds of debris -- was a man with a badly broken leg, who let loose with long, high-volume rants about pain. For a while, an acquaintance of the man kept him company, but he eventually wished him good luck and left. That started Romi thinking about the difficulties of any rescue operation. Lifting him over the heaps of debris -- no matter how many men took part -- seemed impossible. And any effort to carry him out through the water would require an arduous slog over dangerous, uneven footing.

It was late afternoon, and periodic earthquakes were still creating panic. With each one came cries of "Air laut naik!" People then scattered in every direction; vehicles collided in the streets. To react as quickly as possible to another wave, Faridah, the shopkeeper, removed her sarong, which had slowed her running, and hung it around her neck like a scarf. She concluded that it would be best to be farther from the sea and jumped onto the crowded flatbed of a Daihatsu pickup heading south out of the city. When the driver reached the outskirts, he herded everyone out, saying, "I don't think the water will reach here." But Faridah had her doubts. How did this man know the mind of the water? A slow-moving Mitsubishi 10-wheeler was passing. She pulled herself into the big vehicle, using the heavy chain that hung from its open back gate. Soon others hopped aboard, including some injured soldiers and a family of 10. As the truck rolled out of the city, the people made few sounds except moans. They had time to contemplate.

Faridah no longer believed that this was the end of the world. There had been earthquakes, yes. But the sun still shone brightly above, and the sky had not cracked into pieces and fallen to the ground. These were not the world's final hours.

When she was younger, she taught classes in Islam. Allah, she knew, had a purpose for everything, and she thought that this cataclysm was a sign of his vexation with the Acehnese: More was expected of them than of other Muslims. Aceh was supposed to be a reverent place of scholarship, a traditional stopover for pilgrims going west to make hajj in Mecca. But instead, there was too little prayer and too much immorality.

It made perfect sense to her that Allah aimed the killer waves at these particular shores. The Acehnese were his chosen people.

Sambiyo, the policeman, found a soaked mattress pad to cover Maisara, placing it over her shoulders and breasts. As he helped her walk through the deep water, she fainted. He then cradled her body to keep her from drowning, and that is when he first saw the deep gash in her left leg. The wound went from her knee into the meat of her lower calf. He was surprised she had been able to walk the few steps she did.

Eventually, four men were needed to carry her the 50 yards to land. They used a wood door -- culled from the debris -- as a stretcher and took her out on their shoulders. When Maisara came to, she stared at the policeman, at his crew cut, his broad nose, his narrow forehead. "You're from Java, yes?" He nodded. There were cultural differences. She knew it would be more respectful to address him as Mas rather than Abang. "Mas, please don't leave me!" she insisted frantically. "I've lost my husband and daughters. I don't know where they are. I'm all alone."

Each time Sambiyo went away, she made him vow to come right back. In the evening he took Maisara to the home of a doctor who lived across from the police post. It was a small white house. On the roof were a flower garden and large satellite antenna. Several other survivors had been perched there for hours, afraid of another wave.

Sambiyo promised to look in on Maisara in the morning. But before he left, she begged one more favor, that he go to the nearby mosque and ask over the loudspeaker, Has anyone seen Muharram M. Nur and his daughters, Firda, age 11, Ulfa, 9, and Anis, 3? She gave the policeman detailed descriptions of each. "Muharram is big and tall, and whenever people meet him, they ask if he has Arab blood," she said.

As it turned out, the mosque had no electricity for its loudspeaker or gasoline for its generator. No announcement could be made. Maisara was disconsolate when she was told. She was a superstitious woman, and this struck her as a bad omen.

Dr. Sri had stayed with her patients. But at 5 p.m., her uncle, Azharuddin, and her cousin Ronaldi arrived at the hospital. It had taken them two hours to walk there, and they brought good news. Her family, reacting to the severity of the earthquake, had moved to safety before the tsunami. Now her parents were terribly anxious for Sri to join them, and she was certainly eager to do that. She issued orders: the most seriously hurt patients were to be carried down to the street to see if someone might transport them to the military hospital. Sri tried to flag down vehicles, but no one would stop. In frustration, she left the patients in the hands of the few remaining interns.

The long walk home provided her little relief from the morbid day. With each step, Sri saw more of the dead and wounded. Her uncle quietly advised her to remove her white medical coat, lest it begin attracting people who needed help. Dr. Sri folded the frock into a tight parcel, keeping it beneath her arm the rest of the way.

That night, rain came spitting out of the sky. At first, Romi was happy for the wetness. Raindrops fell into his mouth, and there were concave objects nearby to catch water for later. But the brief, heavy rain was followed by mosquitoes, and they fed on him as if aware of his helplessness. He had trouble sleeping. The wounds on his back stuck to the wood. He would drift off to sleep for a few moments and then awaken in pain each time he moved even a few inches. Every few hours, the man with the broken leg would scream, "When is somebody going to help me?" Romi thought these exertions ridiculous. Who would hear the man in the middle of the night? Who would care?

Haikal slept alone in his mother's room. Many guests were at his parents' house, but everyone else stayed outside in dread of earthquakes. Exhausted and aching, Haikal preferred to rest in a properly enclosed place. Yet each time the ground trembled, he found himself scampering into the yard, joining the others who feared that the walls and ceiling would fall in on them. Finally, at about 3 a.m., he decided he was simply too tired to spring again into motion. However much the earth shook, he no longer left the bed.

A big yellow house, which belonged to the wealthy owner of a lumberyard, had largely withstood the mighty waves, and though it was on the other side of the inlet, Jaloe used it as a marker to surmise where his own home once stood. He was barefoot, and it hurt his feet to step through the shards of wreckage. Still, he continued his inspection until he was satisfied. Nothing was left of his home, and no one was there.

He began walking south toward the center of the city. The abundance of mud-covered corpses made his legs wobble with horror. He thought of chickens, their throats slit, falling dead willy-nilly. He made his way through Kampung Mulia and on to Peunayong. Then he wandered along the median strip on Panglima Polim road, past the banks, the Honda and Suzuki dealerships, the Kodak and Fuji photo studios. He turned right at the Simpang Lima traffic circle beyond the KFC and the gas company. Near the mosque at Beurawe, he met a neighbor. She told him his children were alive.

"Where are they?" he asked.

"I don't know, but I saw all three."

He wondered if she really knew, and he made her swear to it. He thanked her and Allah and continued his determined search, going to Simpang Surabaya, then turning left on Daud Beureueh boulevard, then back to Beurawe, then to the Grand Mosque. He was still barefoot, walking in the glow of the moon. Well past midnight, he realized that the weather had gotten cold, and he wondered why he had left his red canvas jacket in the boat. Then he remembered. He had used it to cover those pitiful women.

The jacket had touched the dead, and he would never be able to wear it again.

III. LIVING AMONG THE DEAD

During the next days, there were more earthquakes: 18 on Monday, 5 on Tuesday, 7 on Wednesday, 7 on Thursday, 9 on Friday. Each tremor was inevitably followed by replenished panic. Many people felt Banda Aceh was doomed by a curse that had yet to run its course. Power was out in most of the city. Phones were dead. Stores and gas stations were shut. Those people with the means to do so fled the city for places outside the circumference of damnation. But most of the dispossessed had no means of escape or anywhere to go. Because their husbanded cash and gold had been forfeited to the marauding water, families were reckoning with instant poverty; many people were literally left with nothing -- not even coins in their pockets or clothes on their backs. Then there was the compounded grief of multiple deaths. Entire communities had been pulverized, inundated and slaughtered. Nearly 25 percent of the people in and around Banda Aceh would eventually be counted among the dead or missing. In Lampulo, Jaloe's home, it would be 64 percent; in Lambada, Maisara's home, 62 percent; in Lamjabat, Romi's home, 85 percent; in Peulanggahan, Haikal's home, 71 percent; in Bitai, Faridah's home, 68 percent.

The familiar had become the macabre. The coastline itself had been thrust inland, its contours forever changed. Beaches that were once picturesque resembled dumpsites. The lighthouse at Ulee Lheue lost its beacon; exposed wiring now twisted from the top like a candlewick. Boats from the colorful fishing fleet had been pitched deep into the city and now rested surrealistically askew. A 3,000-ton ship -- a seaworthy mobile power plant owned by the electric company -- had been swept overland into Punge, a neighborhood two miles from the sea. The gargantuan vessel, 210 feet long and four stories high, rode the waves in a curious, serpentine path, swerving just in time to avoid a mosque.

The beautiful had become the grotesque. Blang Padang, the city's biggest park and the starting point for the 10K race, had been turned into a debris-filled bog. Dozens of runners died there, as did one of the eminences in attendance, Mayor Syarifuddin Latief. Banda Aceh's great architectural jewel, the black-domed Baiturrahman Grand Mosque, was basically intact, but every inch of its elegant grounds now had an overlay of splintered wood and decaying corpses. Azman Ismail, the chief imam, stayed away from the befouled landmark for six days. When he finally returned, he looked upon the bloodied marble floors and declared the mosque unfit for worship. He relented only after people pleaded, agreeing to lead Friday-afternoon prayers. But then, shortly before he could begin, another earthquake rattled the city, and the frightened imam went home.

Local government collapsed. The city health department's main offices were destroyed, and 102 of its 536 employees were dead. Those still alive were consumed by their own tragedies. Dr. Marzuki, its director, had been in Jakarta during the tsunami. After rushing back, he found that five of his six children -- ages 18, 16, 12, 6 and 9 months -- were presumed dead. His home had been near the sea. An eyewitness, perhaps confecting a consoling image, told him that his children had held hands as they faced the sea, bravely confronting the waves together.

The city's dead were dispersed erratically, swept inland with the tsunami or dragged out to sea with the backwash. Reverence for the bodies was impractical. Tens of thousands of corpses were left to the crazed air dance of flies and the persevering interest of hungry dogs. Eka Susila, a 27-year-old engineer in the public-works department, was put in charge of collecting the deceased. For days, he lacked volunteers and vehicles and clear roads upon which they might pass. When several dozen volunteers did appear, he lacked masks and gloves, necessities after bloated, unrecognizable corpses began to leak. As additional manpower arrived from outside Aceh, and thousands of bodies could finally be retrieved, there were no kafan (shrouds) for the dead. Nor was there heavy machinery to dig enormous holes for the graves. When excavation finally did begin, complaints from several imams interrupted the work after bodies were crudely tumbled off dump trucks into their resting places.

It would take three months to pick up corpses readily within sight, much longer to find remains evident by only their stench. By Eka's count, 53,835 bodies are now buried behind a short red-and-white picket fence in a weedy field along the road to the airport.

On the day after the tsunami, Dr. Sri, accompanied by her mother and younger sister, returned to the general hospital. If physicians were working, she wanted to do her part. But the buildings were deserted, and the three women instead went to find out what had become of their house. Though Keuramat, their neighborhood, was not a flattened necropolis like those nearer the sea, their home was a ruin, with walls and beams missing, dishevelment and water within and the carcass of a cow in the front yard.

Still, there was reason to be grateful. Rooting through the wreckage, the women unearthed many items precious to them. The cutlery and dishes were in an overturned cabinet. Their jewelry and a small stash of gold were in a black vinyl briefcase.

Maisara, the housewife, had suffered dozens of wounds. Hurting worst were the gash in the bend of her left knee and a cut along her right ear, where a flap of skin was hanging open behind the lobe. On the Sunday of the maelstrom, her worry for her family was so preoccupying that she had little awareness of physical pain. But by the next morning, the wounds were demanding their share of consideration. She was in agony.

Sambiyo, the policeman, continued to stop by the house where Maisara had spent the night. He was afraid that no one would find her and that she would remain his particular burden. But late in the afternoon, Maisara's brother-in-law Irfan learned where she was and came to the house. Her face was so filthy and swollen that he at first mistook her for someone else. She called out to him, rushed into his arms and wept.

Irfan thought Maisara was in no condition to ride on the back of his motorcycle and told her he would return with a car. "Don't leave me alone," she begged. So he took her straightaway to his sister's house, where Maisara's in-laws had gathered in vigil. Her arrival, however welcome, had the simultaneous effect of a dreaded news bulletin. "I don't know where they are," she said of her husband and daughters. "I'm by myself."

That night, she lay on a mattress. Walking was too painful. When she needed to use the toilet, her in-laws pulled the mattress to the bathroom door. Though exhausted, she found it impossible to sleep. Her knee throbbed. Her ear burned. But what really made sleep impossible were the sorrowful questions percolating in a mother's head: Are my girls in the water? Are they cold? Are they hungry?

That same Monday, Haikal, the activist, spent the morning in fruitless search for his wife and two daughters. But then, when he returned to his parents' house in the midafternoon, he found 13-year-old Ika lying on a front-room sofa. As they embraced, he inquired hopefully, "Where is your sister?" But Ika was crying too much to talk. He looked her over. She was feverish and coughing, and he could hear her every breath. But the cuts on her body all seemed minor. "Where were you when the water hit?" Haikal asked. She told him she had been near the Peunayong bridge. "Where are your sister and mother? Are they alive?" In answering, the girl spoke hesitantly, saying only that she had been holding her little sister Aisyah's hand when they became separated.

There was much more to the story, but Ika's grandmother had cautioned her that the details would be too painful for Haikal. He was an important man with important work to do while Aceh was in crisis. He must not become a prisoner of personal grief.

So Ika did not explain that she, her 3-year-old sister and their mother had not gotten very far on the back of Heri Supriadi's motorbike. The narrow streets were crowded, and as they turned toward Keudah, they rammed into a woman but did not stop. "Head for the Grand Mosque!" Haikal's wife, Mawarni, shouted. But those streets were even more crowded. And when Heri looked at the oncoming behemoth wave, his eyes lingered a few seconds too long and the overloaded bike collided into several more people and went down in a flesh-ripping skid. Mawarni was trapped underneath. Heri and the girls ran, with Ika holding her little sister tightly by the hand. Several people were jumping aboard the flatbed of a pickup truck. Ika thought it safer to join them, but as she climbed in, someone jarred her hand. She lost her grip on Aisyah.

"Take me with you!" her horrified little sister was crying out.

Aisyah's arms were outstretched. So were Ika's. The wave arrived before they could touch.

The truck driver who had taken Faridah, the shopkeeper, and the others out of the city found them a place to sleep and then offered a ride back on Monday. It had been a woeful night. Faridah could not breathe easily when she sat up, and her back and sides hurt when she lay down. A stoop-shouldered 75-year-old woman named Nyak Mu tried to comfort her. The old lady was herself frail and nearly toothless. But she was endlessly kind and had been uninjured in the tsunami. "You should come home with me," she told Faridah, giving her a satchel full of clothes to use as a pillow.

Nyak Mu lived in an old panggung house surrounded by banana trees and chicken coops. Faridah would remain there for 10 days as her injuries healed. Each morning she went to look for her husband and their two adopted daughters. Each afternoon she came back feeling a little more discouraged. On the first nights, Faridah slept by herself in a small upstairs room. Then she moved closer to Nyak Mu, lying on a straw pallet at the foot of the other woman's bed. The old lady's embracing kindness had been restorative. It soothed Faridah merely to hear the rhythm of Nyak Mu's breathing. Faridah began to call her "Mama."

Though flat on his back in the debris, Romi, the deliveryman, did not go unobserved. Now and then, someone would happen by, looking for a family member. On the Tuesday after the tsunami, a merciful young man noticed Romi beneath the ruthless sun and offered to move him to a shady niche in the rubble. This required painful maneuvering. As Romi was lifted to his feet, he felt as if each of his bones was being whittled with a knife. He screamed, and when the pain subsided, he winced with embarrassment. He had been urinating on himself for two days, and the odor rose telltale from his pants. Slowly then, with Romi's left arm over his shoulders, the young stranger dragged him to a spot nearer the man with the broken leg and then set out to scavenge for items that might make the time ahead more bearable. He returned with some bottled water, pieces of coconut, soggy bags of snacks and an army camouflage raincoat. He said he regretted he could not do more and then went splashing away on his own business.

Within a few hours, several soldiers came along, seeking missing comrades. "Where did you get that raincoat?" they asked Romi suspiciously. The soldiers showed little compassion for a stranded man's deathly predicament. Romi asked if they might at least carry him to the nearest road. "Just be patient," they answered dismissively.

That night, the shrieking of the fellow with the broken leg was even louder than before. Romi's spot on the debris was a few feet lower than the other man's, and though they could not see each other, they occasionally talked. The man described himself as the owner of a coffee shop, which was not true. Actually, he was a vagrant, considered to have gone mad by many who knew him. Now, hour after hour, he kept shouting the same question: "When will they take us to the hospital?"

Romi had learned how to reply from the soldiers. "Be patient," he said.

The few passable roads in Banda Aceh were crowded going both ways. Just as some people were desperate to get out, others were desperate to get in. How else could they learn if their loved ones were alive? On that same Tuesday, Maisara's parents arrived from the city of Sigli. Her injuries were very alarming, and the lack of medical care concerned them. They convinced her that while Muharram's family searched for him and the girls, she should return with them. They left for Sigli that same evening. In the car, Maisara fell into her first deep sleep since the ordeal began. In her dreams, her daughters were running. She was behind them and never did catch up.

Jaloe, the fisherman, had yet to find his wife and three children. There was no method to his search. Sometimes he walked the rubble-strewn streets, sometimes he watched passers-by from beneath a tree. Finally, on Wednesday morning, as he stood in the shade along Tengku Imum Lueng Bata street, he saw his 14-year-old daughter, Mutia, on the back of a motorcycle. He called out to her. She ran to him. "What has become of your brothers?" he asked as they hugged. She, Mukhlis and Azarul had survived together.

"And your mother?" Jaloe asked.

The answer bled all the joy from the moment. Jaloe's family had run like everyone else. Mukhlis, 15, was carrying Azarul, 5, handing him back and forth to a friend. Mutia was leading the way. From where they were, near the shore, it looked as if the sea had risen up on its hind legs. With the wave a few hundred yards away, Mutia bounded up an outside staircase to the second floor of a large house. Before following her, Mukhlis looked back for his mother, a sickly woman afflicted with rheumatism. She had fallen. Mukhlis began to go back for her.

"Keep running!" his mother ordered. "I'm right behind."

Romi, still stranded, heard voices aloft in the breeze. It sounded as if his wife were happily talking to his daughter. It was predawn, Wednesday. He might have been awake, he might have been dreaming. Either way, he took it as a sign they were safe. The darkness was pleasant and otherwise quiet. The man with the broken leg had stopped ranting.

Come daybreak, Romi would have the first of several visitors. More people had begun to walk through the debris, some looking for loved ones, some scavenging for valuables. "I've lost my wife," said an old man, sitting down beside Romi and starting a conversation. Romi was parched near the point of delirium, and he asked for something to drink. The old man could do no better than dip a pot into the dirty water. Once the contents had settled, the liquid looked relatively clean, and Romi tasted it. The grit and salt made him gag. Still, it was better than nothing, and he asked that some be given to the fellow with the broken leg. The old man moved across the debris and made a studied appraisal. "Don't bother about him anymore," he said. "He's dead."

At midday, Romi was spotted by a family -- one woman and five men, including a boyhood friend of his named Hamdani. They not only promised to carry him out, they also were enthusiastic about it, fashioning a stretcher from two beams and the meshed rope of a hammock. Though Romi yowled in pain when lifted into the contraption, he urged them to start walking though the waist-deep shallows. But they had gone only 30 yards when one of them stepped on a nail. As blood oozed from his foot, he and the others concluded that their good deed was probably not such a wise idea. Apologizing, they placed Romi on a small island of debris and built him a canopy from four lengths of wood and a straw mat. Disappointed but somewhat less uncomfortable, Romi renewed his wait. Near nightfall, he heard a familiar voice calling his name. His younger brother, Maisuri, had gotten word of his situation. It had taken him hours of searching before he stumbled upon the right mound of rubble.

"Can you walk?" Maisuri asked.

"I can't even sit up," Romi replied.

The two brothers were overjoyed to see each other, but for several minutes they left something important unsaid, one man afraid to ask, the other afraid to answer. Finally, Romi inquired about his wife and 2-year-old daughter.

"I've been looking all over, but I haven't found them yet," Maisuri said. In this case, "them" was a widely encompassing pronoun that included their mother, two sisters, another brother, their aunt and many cousins. "Abang, I think they are all gone," Maisuri said, pausing to allow the words to penetrate. "I think only you and I have made it."

Romi's earlier optimism had been so complete that the news confounded him.

"Not even the bodies?" he asked his brother.

"No, not even the bodies."

With his wife and younger daughter missing, Haikal, the activist, may have been at the cliff's edge of despair, but he also felt at the center of historic events. By Wednesday, he had use of two satellite phones. The lines at his office -- the Aceh NGO Forum -- were working again. He fielded calls. He went to meetings. He gave advice.

Ika, his ailing daughter, wanted him to spend more time with her. "Father hasn't done anything for me," she complained to her grandmother Zalecha. Actually, Haikal had grown ever more fretful about Ika's labored breathing and fever. Friends in Jakarta were urging him to take her to the capital for treatment. They promised that an ambulance would be waiting at the airport. On Thursday evening, Haikal decided they were right. Whatever it took, he would get Ika on a plane. He borrowed cash. He borrowed a van. He took Ika, his mother and three student nurses to Banda Aceh's civil airport.

Each seat on every flight had become precious. People had been camping in the departure area for days. Haikal recognized some of them, and a few were more influential than he was. Acquiring a ticket seemed a hopeless challenge, but someone suggested that he try the military airport, and within minutes, there he was, animated as ever, talking his way past the sentries at the guardhouse. His timing was extraordinarily opportune. A Boeing 707 was on the runway. It belonged to the Australian Air Force. It was headed to Jakarta. The engine had already started, and a line of passengers was waiting to get aboard. Haikal dashed straight at the plane, waving his arms. His mother and the student nurses followed, carrying Ika on a cot.

An armed guard stopped Haikal, and as the two men argued, they were joined by a lieutenant colonel from the Indonesian Air Force. "I help people all the time," Haikal said, introducing himself. "But today I'm the one who needs help." Two men were getting off the plane, and one appeared to be an Australian doctor. Haikal knew very little English, so he begged in pantomime, his hands in a position of prayer. The doctor agreed to listen to Ika's breathing; he also pressed his hands on her tummy. With the lieutenant colonel translating, he told Haikal that the girl was undoubtedly very ill. In fact, he thought she was too sick to fly. Again, Haikal begged, and when that did not work, he threatened to tie himself to the plane. The doctor checked Ika again, and finally the Australians relented. But only two seats were available. Haikal had to decide. With so much to do in Banda Aceh, he thought it better that his mother accompany the child.

"You have to be strong like me," he told Ika as she climbed the stairs of the plane. She was trembling so much her grasp jiggled the handrail. Her borrowed T-shirt and pajama bottoms were way too big. His daughter, Haikal thought, was so frightfully thin.

Dr. Sri's family was unnerved. Death seemed everywhere they looked, in every breath they inhaled. Looters were now prowling about, and it appeared that rather than preventing crime, soldiers and the police were sometimes taking part. The family hoped to drive to the central part of the province, to Takengon, where they had relatives. But Dr. Sri did not want to go. She continued to hope the hospital would reopen. She still had no word about her two best friends, Dr. Cut and Dr. Denafianti, or about their mentor, Dr. Agus.

But the family refused to leave without her, and Dr. Sri reluctantly gave in. They left soon after dawn on Friday, five days after the tsunami. Well into the trip, Dr. Sri received a text message on her cellphone. This was odd in itself. Her phone had not been working. The message was from Dr. Cut's family: they had concluded that she was dead. With that news, she imagined her friend smothering in the water. Dr. Sri began to sob, and then the sobs became screams. She carried on so inconsolably the family had to pull over. Her mother instructed her to offer prayers, but the screams went on even as she bowed before Allah. Once the 12-hour drive was over, Dr. Sri demanded to go home. After all, she was a doctor, she told the others. She left in the morning.

Romi's brother had promised to return that same evening with more men to carry the makeshift stretcher. But darkness delayed him until the morning, and even though he brought along plenty of assistants as well as a container of fish and rice, Romi was furious. "You said you were coming right back," he snarled. Waiting had become harder once it was coupled with anticipation. He no longer felt like being patient.

Carrying the stretcher proved arduous. Six men hoisted the litter, but they had to stop every few yards. Others toiled in front of them, probing the terrain beneath the water and clearing away obstacles. Plywood was placed under foot to act as a floorboard, then the planks were retrieved and reused. Volunteers kept joining the expedition, taking a turn at carrying the stretcher. By the end, 25 men were involved. The rescue took more than four hours.

All the while, Romi lay on his stomach. He did not say much, partly because he was stunned by all the hideously swollen bodies they passed. For five days, he had been able to view only a patch of the devastation. Now the absolute horror of it became clear.

Ika, Haikal's 13-year-old daughter, was placed in intensive care at Pondok Indah Hospital in Jakarta. She did not want to be there; she kept asking to leave. Her breathing remained difficult. She was petrified. As she grew more emotional, the doctors asked to sedate her heavily -- to induce a temporary coma -- to allow her body a better chance at recovery. This was discussed back and forth on the phone among Haikal, his mother and his friends. The decision was to listen to the doctors.

By late Friday, Ika's condition was grim. Haikal was asked to come to Jakarta as quickly as possible. Once again, he went to the airport without a ticket, this time succeeding through the intervention of a movie actress who had visited the NGO Forum. The flight made a stop in Medan, and Haikal had to deplane. As he sat in the V.I.P. area, he felt strangely incomplete. He had been in that airport many times but never without a suitcase. This seemed aptly metaphorical, and feelings of depression pulsed through him. What did he have left? He had one daughter, and she might be dying.

When Haikal got to the hospital, Ika was unconscious, breathing through a hose. "Your father is here," he whispered. He was crying, and he believed that when he touched his cheek to hers, teardrops rolling from both their eyes met like tributaries to a river. She was hooked up to a monitor. Haikal made a nurse explain the meaning of the many lines and numbers. He wanted to keep track of every up and down in a notebook.

One day passed, then two. It had been a full week since the tsunami, and late that Sunday, Haikal left his daughter's side to rest in the room he shared with his mother. Just after midnight, he was summoned back. Doctors told him Ika seemed near death. For an hour, his eyes drifted back and forth between his fragile daughter and the blinking monitor. He knew exactly when her heart stopped. The vital line had gone flat.

IV. A SPECIAL BURDEN

The world had seen the onrushing wave on the news, and people could imagine it, all those tons of mesmerizing water, getting closer and rising higher. Most of the early video had been from the vacation spots of Thailand. The tourists had camcorders; they spoke in English. In those first days, less was mentioned about Aceh. For years, most foreigners had been forbidden to enter the province as the government in Jakarta and the rebels of GAM pursued their low-boil war. The tsunami opened that bolted door. Within the week, aid workers from abroad began arriving by the hundreds to assist Indonesian emergency teams; foreign militaries were permitted to airlift supplies. Within months, more than 120 foreign NGO's would set up operations. For most of them, money was no object. Generosity toward the tsunami victims was unprecedented, "breaking all records for voluntary giving," according to the World Bank. Some $5.5 billion flowed into the Red Cross and Red Crescent federation, Oxfam, World Vision, CARE and other charities. Governments added more. In total, about $13.6 billion was pledged toward the recovery in grants and loans, with about half going to Indonesia.

In Banda Aceh, the infusion of foreigners, while decidedly peculiar, was certainly welcome. The general hospital had become a mud-caked ghost town. During that first week, only 5 employees from a staff of 956 showed up to work; 11 doctors and 88 nurses had been killed. But soon thereafter, the Indonesian Army and assorted volunteers started cleaning things up, sometimes with machinery but more often with push brooms and bare hands. Field hospitals were erected on the grounds by Germany and Australia. Physicians from other parts of Indonesia resurrected the emergency room. Dr. Sri was pleased to assist them, though there was not always much for her to do. Just a week earlier, she was so badly needed, improvising her way through a hectic crisis, even wrapping wounds with plastic snipped from seat covers. Now she was inessential, and it felt awkward. It was as if the professionals had arrived, and the amateurs from Aceh could step aside.

Acute hunger was avoided, as was any major outbreak of disease. The world's emergency response was a triumph of humanitarian action. If anything, there was a redundancy of effort. "A scramble for beneficiaries began" among the aid groups, said the World Disasters Report of the Red Cross and Red Crescent, issued in October. The "humanitarian space" was too small for so many organizations. They had "too much money," and as they competed for victims to help, they "jealously guarded their information to ensure their niche." These difficulties would presage the problems to come in the reconstruction. Important choices would need to be made. Was Aceh to be rebuilt into what it was before? Was it to be better? With money spread among so many hands, who would do what parts of the crucial work? Surely the communities themselves had to be involved. But local government had been crippled. The aid groups, while well intentioned, were outsiders, each with its own board and set of donors. Could they cooperate with one another?

The tsunami had flattened the coast in a matter of minutes. The recovery, on the other hand, would take years. In the meantime, people were living wretchedly in tents and slapdash barracks or crowded in with relatives. Nearly a year after the tsunami, an overwhelming majority of victims would still be without permanent homes.

Among them were Jaloe, Dr. Sri, Maisara, Romi, Haikal and Faridah.

During those first days after the disaster, there was good reason to hope that loved ones might not be dead, just hard to find amid the chaos. Even after a week, hope did not necessarily dwindle, for there were stories upon stories of unlikely reunions. Ten days after the tsunami, Faridah herself entered a tent camp and found she had two surviving brothers, though that was the entirety of her good fortune. Like most others, the shopkeeper in time surrendered to the obvious, that the missing had disappeared in the murky water or were buried in the anonymous heap of a mass grave. Gone were her husband, her two daughters, her father and four other siblings. The enormity of the city's losses actually muffled her impulse for self-pity. Pain so commonplace was somehow more bearable.

Jaloe, the fisherman, never found his wife. Nor did Romi, the deliveryman, recover his wife and daughter. They relied on their faith to assuage their grief: whatever had happened was doubtlessly part of a divine plan too inscrutable to fathom. Haikal, the activist, also found solace in Allah. He pictured his wife and daughters after making their ascension to heaven -- beautiful, comprehending and contented.

Maisara, the housewife, held out hope for her family's survival far longer than most. As she lay for 28 days in a hospital bed, first in Sigli and then in Lhokseumawe, she kept anticipating the arrival of uplifting news. Only months later did logic begin to eat away at this gossamer expectation. Muharram, her husband, was a resourceful journalist. If he were alive, she reasoned, surely he would have gotten word to his family.

Yet she continued to feel sure her three girls were alive. She knew it in her heart; she felt it in her gut. For a time, she considered seeking the assistance of a psychic. Many parents were consulting those imams known to have paranormal powers. It was thought that some could divine a child's whereabouts from the ripples in a glass of water or the patterns in a blackened fingernail. But Maisara knew of no one who had found a youngster this way. Instead she read the newspapers, listened to the radio and pursued the endless outpouring of rumors that passed through forlorn lips. She traveled any place where missing girls were said to be living, whatever their names, whatever their ages.

How else could she ever be sure?

Many Acehnese with a religious education -- like Maisara, Faridah and Haikal -- believed that much in life was predestined. After conception, a soul made a contract with God, without which birth was impossible. Matters like occupation and a marriage partner were decided then, as was the precise instant of death. But during life, people still had choices. Their deeds could be good or evil, leading to heaven or hell. So the tsunami inevitably provoked vexing questions: Had Allah saved the good and punished the bad? Or had the good been rewarded with heaven and the bad left to atone?

The meaning of the event itself was less of a puzzle. Most people agreed that Allah intended the tsunami as a warning or punishment. The cause was depravity in Aceh. Political corruption was inevitably mentioned. So was the availability of strong drink, and not just banana-leaf wine. Romi, the deliveryman, knew of a place where even hard liquor could be purchased. Women were often blamed for being brazen about their sexuality. Though girls usually remained chaste until marriage, and though adultery was still rare, many women were wearing stylish and provocative clothing. Their thoughts were presumed impure. Jaloe, the fisherman, was among the many who had seen harlots near the harbor at Ulee Lheue. These women may have worn the traditional jilbab, but they also sashayed in a fetching way and accompanied men into hotels. Then there were the sins of "the conflict" between the army and GAM: murder, arson, extortion. In mid-August, the two sides would finally sign a peace agreement, something many attributed to the tsunami's admonishment.

Not many Acehnese had traveled beyond the province, but TV had transported them to foreign places. They were aware that the sins they mentioned occurred more commonly elsewhere. But God expected more of the Acehnese, they insisted. For centuries, their closeness to Allah had been their special gift, and now, with the tsunami, their special burden.

I spent more than two months in Banda Aceh. I was assisted by an Indonesian translator, Linda Bong, who had recently been in America on a Fulbright grant. We interviewed more than 50 victims. I then revisited a dozen or so and finally selected six of them for many more hours of talks. Most everyone I spoke with was unfailingly patient; they all had their own ways of telling their stories and managing their emotions. Dr. Sri broke into tears whenever she mentioned her friend Dr. Cut. Maisara, the housewife, was dedicated to precision with every detail. Romi, the deliveryman, added comedic touches to his account, using the phrase "be patient" as a recurrent punch line.

I chose people whose memories seemed clear and consistent. These are their stories, as they told them. It was impossible to verify every detail. Many things were taken on faith. I don't know if Maisara actually saw a serene expression on her daughter's face when the churning wave shot them to the water's surface. But I did become convinced that this is how she remembers it. Other parts of her story were easier to confirm. There is a policeman named Sambiyo. I found him in Jakarta, where he had been transferred from Aceh.

His recollections closely matched Maisara's.

Vast areas of Banda Aceh remain empty except for a scattering of tents and cobbled-together shacks. It is the same with the people: vast holes in their families and cobbled-together hearts. And yet a normalcy of sorts has re-established itself. People make do. They carry on. The city's new economy revolves around the incipient reconstruction. Roads have been cleared, some hospitals repaired, many schools reopened. The aid agencies are present in full force. Overpriced hotels are regularly overbooked. The best homes have been converted into headquarters and guest houses. Restaurants have changed their menus, tempting foreigners with items like "French union soup."

Dr. Sri remains close friends with Dr. Denafianti and their mentor, Dr. Agus. Donors have been kind to the general hospital. The emergency room now has up-to-date electrocardiographs, bedside monitors, mobile ventilators. But though Dr. Sri very much likes working there, she doesn't think her career is going especially well. She failed the exam to become a heart specialist, and her salary remains at the paltry level of a lowly government employee. A foreign NGO would pay her far more. These agencies badly need any Acehnese who can speak even a halting amount of English. Indeed, many of her friends have taken such jobs.

But Dr. Sri considers it selfish to quit a public hospital for the sake of money. And yet at the same time she wonders whether her altruism is itself a kind of self-centeredness. Her family needs the extra income. They are still living with in-laws, which has become humiliating. When I last saw Dr. Sri, she had taken a two-month leave from the hospital to work for the World Health Organization. "The job pays eight times more than the general hospital," she said, emphasizing the "eight" as if asking for absolution, not so much from me as from her conscience.

Haikal has also tapped into the new economy. These humanitarian groups need transportation, and he and some friends have started a rental business with five S.U.V.'s. There is enough demand to warrant more vehicles, but Haikal does not have the time to manage a bigger fleet. The NGO Forum keeps him busy. He is also tending to a new romance. His girlfriend is an Indonesian doctor who came to Aceh after the tsunami. Haikal has begun to think about starting another family. He has already introduced this woman to his own parents and his in-laws. But his dead wife, still so vivid within him, has yet to approve. She came to him in a dream, announcing that she was returning to life and demanding that he choose. "Of course, I'll come back to you," he replied.

One morning, Haikal and I retraced the steps he took while running with the tsunami at his back. All that is left of his home are the fragments of three yellow walls. We stopped at the spot where he put his wife and daughters on the back of his friend's motorcycle. Most houses on the block had not withstood the water any better than his. But then, as we resumed walking, we passed a home that was largely intact. It was beige and two stories high, about 50 yards from his front door. Quite offhandedly, with his finger pointing for only an instant, he said, "If we had just ducked in there, then we.. . ." But he did not finish the sentence. He refuses to allow himself regrets.

Whatever has happened is what Allah willed it to be.

What 550,000 homeless Acehnese want most of all are homes, and far too few have been erected. People are not so much angry as frustrated and perplexed. Time and again, aid groups arrived in a community and made promises. Meetings were held. Surveys were done. Then the foreigners disappeared, only to be replaced by yet others with new sets of promises. Now the rainy season is here, and year-old tents are proving porous. Some aid agencies are back on emergency footing, rushing to accomplish what might have been done six months ago, putting up prefabs until permanent housing can be built.Early on, the government of Indonesia realized the need for an agency to oversee the reconstruction without the customary corruption, using transparent procedures that would satisfy international donors. But the Badan Rehabilitasi dan Rekonstruksi did not come into being until the end of April. In the meantime, aid groups were reluctant to build houses that might later be deemed too big or too small or too near the sea. Then there was the confounding matter of property rights. Many existing land records were destroyed; in many cases, deeds had never been issued. Generally, people want to return to where they lived before, so property lines must be pieced together from the shared memories of neighbors. While this would be hard under any circumstances, it is especially daunting with so many landmarks gone and so much of the land itself washed away.

The reconstruction agency is still busy inventing itself, adding staff, setting standards, approving projects. There is a shortage of qualified contractors and legal timber. But however justifiable the delays, the process seems maddeningly slow to someone like Romi, the deliveryman. After months of being bedridden, he slowly regained use of his legs, and since the early part of the year he has stayed in a tent near where he once had his panggung house, like a homesteader protecting a claim. Lamjabat, the area where he lives, has the feel of a frontier outpost, an occasional sprout of slapdash construction mixed among a few tents within a general barrenness. For a while, Romi, too, had a small share of the new economy as foreman of a crew paid to clean away debris. But that kind of work has petered out. Now he gets by on the $25 a week he earns as a security guard. His brother Maisuri has married, and Romi would like to do the same. "I had the perfect wife," he told me the last time we spoke. "Now I need another perfect wife." I, of course, advised him to be patient.

Faridah, the shopkeeper, has been living in a barracks outside the city. Her room is large, but the thin walls do not extend to the ceiling and provide little privacy. She doesn't complain, however. As always, Faridah is self-reliant. Her hope is to reopen a store, and she is saving up money by selling muffins she bakes in a small kerosene oven. A matchmaker lives behind the barracks, and men continue to think of Faridah as a good catch. A proposal from a widower was recently passed along. But Faridah maintains the same practical standard for matrimony that she had as a girl: a husband would have to bring her fewer troubles instead of more. "I also didn't like how he looks," she told me.

Jaloe, the fisherman, gets by mostly on handouts, from the aid groups, from his friends. He still has use of the policeman's yellow boat, but he does not go to sea that often. The fishing fleet has yet to fully recover. Besides, he no longer feels entirely at ease in the water. He lives with his three children in a tent near the spot where their home used to be. He has come to think of it as his land; after all, he has been there for 25 years. But like so many others, Jaloe was a renter, not an owner, and most renters have been told they will not be entitled to a replacement house. He complained about this to the kepala desa, the elected head of his district. The two men argued back and forth. Why, Jaloe wanted to know, should a landlord with five parcels of land be entitled to five new homes while he gets none at all? The kepala desa thought the question naïve. The tsunami had done nothing to transform the essential nature of society. The poor would still be poor.

"If you buy land, then you can have a house," the kepala desa told the fisherman.

Maisara, the housewife, has a bit of money: about $7,500. Her home, like most others in the city, was uninsured. But her husband had a policy on his life through his job.

Usually, I would see her in the place where she rented a room. But one afternoon we met in the house Maisara used to think of as her "heaven." Some of the walls are still there, and part of a ceiling rests on the support of beams that have gone bowlegged. We stood there within the incompleteness, in space once held together with brick and cement and voices. She intends to rebuild it. Her memories will be the mortar.

There is a homemade sign hanging by a rope from a broken pillar. The writing isn't hers. Maisara would never spell so badly. The sign was made by others, but she finds the sentiment to be a palliative for her impossible sorrow. Maisara has finally accepted the reality that her three girls were forever taken from her by the water.

"Thank you, Allah," the words say. "The tsunami is a gift that has brought those we love to paradise. We are happy to let them go. Those who stay should repent."

Barry Bearak is a reporter for The Times and a visiting professor at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.

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A version of this article appears in print on November 27, 2005, on Page 6006047 of the National edition with the headline: The Day the Sea Came. Today's Paper|Subscribe